Alex Scarrow - City of Shadows

Joseph knew the man was no fool. Waldstein was a genius. But also a ruthless businessman. His technology patents went to the highest bidder even if ultimately it meant his inventions were to be turned into devices for killing, maiming.

Pandora then… a word he noted on a scrap of paper, and promptly forgot about.

The agency, or the New York Project, as Waldstein sometimes referred to it, became ‘active’ on Friday 4 September 2054. An occasion marked only by Joseph and Frasier Griggs. From the comfort and safety of a private research lab at W.G. Systems’ main research campus building in Wyoming, hidden a dozen miles away from the nearest town — Pinedale — amid tall, balding Douglas firs clinging to the valley slopes, the pair of them quietly clinked two glasses of Soyo-Vina Rouge in celebration and began to monitor the archway beneath the Williamsburg Bridge in a place called Brooklyn, New York, in the year 2001. They scanned for potential tachyon leakage or any emergency signal bursts.

Meanwhile, Waldstein had insisted on staying behind in 2001 to directly mentor the team. He wanted his to be the first face they saw as they woke up in their bunk beds. He wanted to be the father figure to the three of them. Said it was important that they wholly trusted him.

‘ They’ll be disorientated and frightened when they first come round,’ he said. ‘ I want to be there for them.’

And so Waldstein’s top-secret project had begun: one team, one field office, and all of history for them to watch out for and protect.

The agency was Waldstein’s back-up plan to keep history safe. That’s what he’d once told Joseph. It was his B plan.

His A plan had been his very public campaign three years ago to ensure that the world’s leaders signed up to an international law forbidding any nation from continuing to develop time-travel technology. It was to be a banned science. But he was wily enough to realize that in this troubled time, while every world leader might publicly denounce the technology, secretly they’d be vigorously funding it. Working on it. Desperate to be the first world power with the ability to take control of time itself: the ultimate weapons system.

‘ I want the New York Project to be self-reliant,’ Waldstein confided in Joseph.

‘ Once it’s up and running, the team will have to manage their own affairs, decide their own mission priorities. They must be entirely self-sufficient. ’

The team would have all the data, equipment, critical replacement parts they needed: spare support unit foetuses, growth tubes, spare component boards for the displacement machine.

Anything else they might need they could buy from a hardware or electronics store back in 2001.

‘ Here in 2054 we must have as little contact with them as possible. We cannot be directly linked to them, Joseph. I cannot afford to be caught dabbling in time travel like this. I must have a plausible, believable… deniability. ’

The team in 2001, then, was to be left entirely to their own devices. Griggs was the most vociferous on that. They had to survive on their own. No way could there be any interaction between the team and them. It could lead to their discovery in 2054. Their arrest. And the penalty under international law — ‘Waldstein’s Law’ — was rightly severe: the death penalty.

However, Waldstein devised a safe way they could make contact. If the team desperately needed to communicate with them in 2054, there was a way that they could do so. He called the method ‘a drop-point document’.

Joseph had been impressed by the man’s ingenuity.

It was a private ad in a Brooklyn newspaper. They had a yellowing page of newsprint contained in a glass case here in 2054. A dog-eared page that had somehow survived intact through half a century. If the team in 2001 needed to send a message forward in time, they simply had to dial that newspaper’s classifieds desk, and place a personal ad to go in the next issue. A personal ad that was to begin with the words, ‘A soul lost in time’.

The personal ad represented history being meddled with in a very small way. It would cause a tiny change. A tiny, harmless time wave that would ripple across fifty-three years to the present and change just one thing: the sheet of newspaper in that glass case.

That was the only method of communication Waldstein intended to permit them to use. Safe. Secret. Untraceable. Under no circumstances were they to beam a tachyon signal forward. If anyone in the present was scanning for telltale signs of time-travel technology development, the tachyon particle would be the giveaway. The smoking gun.

Pandora.

Joseph would have completely forgotten about that word if it wasn’t for another discovery he made not so very long after Waldstein returned from 2001, content that his team based in Brooklyn — the TimeRiders… that was the nickname he had for them — were ready to do the job entirely on their own.

As it happened, that team was the first team based in that Brooklyn archway.

They did quite well. Lasted quite a long time.

7.27 a.m., 12 September 2001, North Haven Plaza, outside Branford

Maddy led Foster by the hand out of the coffee shop, through the stools and tables to meet the others in the middle of the toddler play area, ‘Chuckle Zone’.

Liam spoke first. ‘Bob just picked up a warning signal from SpongeBubba.’

‘I also just detected two idents,’ added Bob.

‘Where?’

‘Three hundred and seventy yards in that direction,’ he said, pointing along the central concourse of the shopping mall towards the front entrance to the parking strip beyond. He was pointing in the direction of their RV.

‘They must have visited our bus first,’ said Sal.

‘How did they know which vehicle was ours?’ Maddy asked. The parking area out front already had a few hundred cars in it. Even more now surely.

‘Your lab unit,’ said Bob. He turned to Rashim. ‘Your lab unit must have left its wireless communication on.’

Rashim nodded. ‘They must have homed in on Bubba’s signal.’

‘All the way from New York?’ said Liam. ‘I thought — ’

‘It’s only a short-range signal. Half a mile and you’d lose it,’ said Rashim.

‘Then they must have already been tailing us,’ said Maddy. She looked at Foster. ‘Do you think?’

He shook his head. ‘I don’t know. It’s possible.’

Becks had been watching the quick-fire conversation, her gaze snapping from one person to the next. But now her eyes suddenly widened as they settled on something at the far end of the concourse. ‘They are here,’ she said softly.

She pointed.

All of them turned to look. Two silhouetted figures emerging through large rotating glass doorways, striding purposefully in their direction, the pallid glow of morning light outside behind.

‘Jay-zus! There’s two of them!’

‘We can’t fight,’ said Maddy. ‘We’ve got to run!’

Bob stiffened, bristled like a guard dog. ‘I can fight them. I can provide you with time to escape.’

‘Don’t be an idiot, Bob,’ said Liam. ‘They’ll rip you to pieces, so they will.’

‘Shadd-yah! Who are they?’

‘We’re wasting time,’ said Maddy. She turned to look in the opposite direction. The concourse carried on another fifty yards where it terminated as a circular eating area, tables and plastic bucket chairs surrounded by a dozen fast-food outlets. A lift and a couple of escalators could take them up to a balcony overlooking the central area, and the upper floor of shops. But as far as she could make out, the only way out of the mall was back towards the approaching support units… and out of those big revolving glass doors at the front.